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Writer's pictureKim Wheeler

The shape of water.


Today I asked my students to read their homework, this week’s subject was anything they chose, some wrote poetry, some wrote love songs, a few sung along to karaoke, a few read wise words from their iPhone and all did so eloquently and eagerly, not ashamed to stand up in front of the entire group, but one guy stood up and with the help of you-tube delivered a rousing informed perfectly delivered speech about water. I was blown away. So, when I got home, I decided to check his work out and thought I would share…




There are two kinds of water: salt water and fresh water. Saltwater contains—you guessed it—large quantities of salt, while fresh water has a dissolved salt concentration of less than 1%. Only fresh water can be used as drinking water.Americans use five times the amount of water that Europeans use.A small drip from a faucet can waste as much as 75 litres of water a day.Frozen water is 9% lighter than water, which explains why ice floats.Water is the only substance on earth that is found naturally in three forms: liquid, solid and gas.A trillion tons of water is evaporated every day by the sun!If you ever catch a fever, be sure to drink lots of water—it regulates your body temperature. In Canada, there is more water underground than on the surface.Most of the water found on the earth's surface is permanently frozen or salty.Less than 1% of the water supply on earth can be used as drinking water.More than 90% of the world's supply of fresh water is located in Antarctica.The earth is a closed system that rarely loses or gains extra matter. Essentially, this means that the same water that existed on earth millions of years ago is still present today.Pure water has no smell and no taste. It also has a pH level of around 7.Canada is home to 25% of the world's wetlands. In fact, it's the largest wetland area in the world.Our bodies are 60-70% water; our brains are 75% water; our lungs are nearly 90% water, and our blood is about 82% water.



1. There are about 1.5 billion cubic kilometres of water on Earth – that's 1.5 billion trillion litres, or 800 trillion Olympic swimming pools.

2. If all that water was evenly spread over the Earth's surface it would have a depth of 3,700 metres.

3. 97% of the Earth's water is salty. 2.1% is locked up in polar ice caps and less than 1% is available as fresh water.

Sian Butcher / BuzzFeed

4. Water is sticky. The molecules love to stick to things, especially each other. It's what gives it such a large surface tension. It keeps you alive: it means water can pull blood up narrow vessels in the body, often against the force of gravity.

5. Water should be a gas at room temperature – all similar molecules, such as hydrogen sulphide(H2S) and ammonia(NH3), are gases. The stickiness of water molecules holds them together as a liquid.

6. Water is the second most common molecule in the universe. The most common is hydrogen gas, H2.

7. The biggest known cloud of water vapour was discovered by Nasa scientists around a black hole 12 billion light years from Earth. There are 140 trillion times as much water in it as all the water in the world's oceans.

8. All the water on Earth arrived in comets and asteroids. It happened between 4.5bn and 3.8bn years ago, a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment.

9. The Antarctic has been covered in ice for more than 30m years. Right now, it is covered by 10 thousand trillion tons of snow and ice.

10. There is ice on the poles of the moon, and on the poles of Mars and Mercury.

11. There are at least 16 different kinds, or "phases", of ice. All of them have different crystal structures.

12. The Sun and other stars like it create the equivalent of 100 million times the water in the Amazon river every second.

13. Your body is between 60% and 70% of water. This changes at different times of your life: a human foetus is around 95% water for the first months, getting to 77% water at birth. In a 70kg person, there are 42 litres of water.

14. Two-thirds of that water is within your cells.

16. Water expands when it freezes, unlike almost every other liquid. This has been crucial to life – lakes and rivers freeze from the top down, so even though the Earth has faced successive ice ages, there has always been liquid water for life to continue evolving.

17. Hot water freezes faster than cold water. This is known as the Mpemba Effect, and no-one knows why it happens.

18. A five-minute shower uses 200 litres of water.

19. You use 8 litres to flush a toilet – about the same as you use to brush your teeth.

20. It takes 200 litres of water to produce the coffee beans for one cup of coffee

21. It takes 15,000 litres of water to produce 1 kg of beef.

22. It takes 100 litres to make 2 slices of bread and 65 litres to make the cheese filling in your sandwich.

23. It takes 150 litres of water to make one pint (568ml) of beer

24. A kilo of cotton – enough for a shirt and a pair of jeans – needs 10,000 litres of water to produce.

25. Everywhere there is liquid water on Earth, there is life. Even if that water is nearly boiling, or the area is skin-burningly acidic.

27. There is a hot ocean under the ice crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, probably sitting on a bed of rock. Since a hydrothermal vent at the bottom of one of the Earth’s oceans is thought to be the best candidate for where life started on our planet, astrobiologists think Enceladus is a good place to look for alien life.

27. Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli once came up with a plan to use water to win a war, by diverting the river Arno. Da Vinci was obsessed with water; he drew its vortices endlessly. He also worked out a lot of the science of how it flows, well before the field of fluid dynamics was established

and for you kids out there who have no idea how you get water...



not quite finished yet..........

It has been suggested that the above Ikea video is nothing more than a hoax, a smooth advertising campaign by some slick sales team. It has been stated that plants cannot understand words, I would tend to agree with that but if plants are mainly water, 90% I am reliably informed and if we believe the above messages about water feeling pain and being intelligent then plants also MUST feel the pain, I can also add that when I say a word, lets say ' you pudding' very aggressively to my dog, their face changes from smile to sadness, the eyes look sadder, the body sinks a bit,the tails immediately falls between the legs, however, if I say 'you pudding' in a kind friendly manner the dog smiles, wags its tail then jumps all over me. So I do believe all the above to be right and we need to change our knuckle-dragging opinions from what we are told to learn at school and start to embrace that any kind of abuse is just unacceptable and belongs in the dark recesses of the brain dead like D J Trump and his white supremacist chums...

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